Neglected Materials on Shihua (Tales with Poems) as a Genre of Buddhist Narrative of the Song Dynasty

Abstract

The Shijia rulai shidi xiuxing ji 釋迦如來十地修行記 (A record of the ten stages of self-cultivation of the Tathagata Sakyamuni) is a text composed in simple classical Chinese that brings together the story of Sakyamuni’s awakening with the stories of nine of his prior incarnations in which he accumulated by his extraordinary virtues the good karma that will allow him to become the Buddha of the present kalpa. The text does not carry the name of a compiler, and it was never included in any edition of the Chinese Tripitaka. In recent centuries the text was quite popular on the Korean peninsula, and it has often been assumed to be a Korean compilation. The earliest preserved edition, however, was revised by an otherwise unknown Shaoshi shanren 少室山人 and printed in 1448 at the establishment of the Ming-dynasty Prince of Yi 伊 at Luoyang at the order of the eunuch Puxiu 普 秀. This information makes a Chinese origin of the text more likely. The date of the edition on which Shaoshi shanren based his edition is unknown. A date mentioned in the tenth story when discussing the year of death of the Buddha suggests that that story was originally composed in 1328, but it is unclear whether this date also refers to the compilation of all ten stories as a single text. The Shijia rulai shidi xiuxing ji was reprinted in Korea in 1660, and continued to enjoy a considerable popularity there, but would appear to have dropped out of circulation in China itself. While there exists a considerable body of scholarship on this text in Korean (unfortunately inaccessible to me), the Shijia rulai shidi xiuxing ji has only quite recently started to attract the attention of Chinese scholars. This attention so far has been focused on a single story in the compilation. This is the seventh item in